Pop-up cards are known in a variety of configurations and, for example, mention can be made of U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,096,751, 5,083,389, 4,938,344, 3,834,051 and 3,798,806, all of which disclose various techniques, in association with greeting cards or display cards or the like, for erecting a portion of a card by some action of the user.
More recently there has developed an interest in providing sports cards or the like in which the figure of an athlete can be portrayed in a cutout portion and can be erected on the card which can also carry printed matter relating to that athlete, e.g. in the nature of biographical details, athletic background and/or athletic achievement. Such cards may utilize a slide between front and rear panels of the card which can be actuated by a user to erect the cutout portion bearing the figure of the athlete.
Card devices utilizing slides between front and rear panels are themselves known in conjunction with slide rule type devices in a number of configurations and mention may be made in this connection of U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,025,767, 3,441,208, 3,902,656, 4,132,348, 4,262,939, in addition to the patent document cited therein.
For the most part, in the past, the devices have required rails along the lateral edges of the erectable structure for effectively guiding them, complex die cutting arrangements and complicated fabrication methods with respect to the gluing techniques.
While the last mentioned patents also include patents which disclose the use of tear-away strips to liberate the slide, as far as I am aware, no earlier system for the fabrication of pop-up cards has been able effectively to utilize a tear-away strip designed to render the movable parts of such a card actuatable by the user, or to provide a system in which a tear-away strip could maintain the movable parts of a pop-up card in an immovable state until the user was prepared to actuate the same, thereby ensuring that the pop-up card would reach the consumer in a totally intact state ready for use.